Developing for Good: A Quick Look at MyLNK
The team at Don’t Panic Labs has worked on a lot of software over the years (10 years last month, by the way). We have stood up numerous new applications and platforms for our customers and have transformed many platforms into more modern and stable platforms to help customers grow their businesses. But the single…
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Experience Design: Meeting Stakeholders Where They’re At
Communication is at the heart of designing and building software. When undertaking a software project, it’s often necessary to build a consensus around critical decisions with a group of stakeholders. At Don’t Panic Labs, we use communication and design techniques to co-create a shared understanding between a client’s stakeholders and our development team. It’s a…
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Working for Steaks
Ribeye steaks are one of my favorite things. Not sirloins, not New York strips, but ribeyes. I love a good fatty steak cooked with salt, pepper, and compound butter. Very tasty. So, of course, I was happy when we got to work with the Nebraska Cattlemen Association. The application we built with Cattlemen provides a…
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10 Rules for Providing a Good User Experience
I am not a designer, I don’t play one on TV, and I didn’t stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night. But over the years, I have developed some thoughts around UI / UX that have resulted in some basic “rules” to apply when building systems. While this set of rules is far from…
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Working for Beer
Beer, Beets, Battlestar Galactica. Oh my! I feel it is safe to assume that beer is pretty popular here in the good old USA. Thirty years ago, everyone was drinking their favorite big brand: Bud Light, Miller Light, or — my personal favorite of the classic big beers — Coors Light. Now the world has…
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Acceptance Test Criteria: Gaining a Shared Project Understanding
We have several activities that add layers of quality to our software development projects. These activities include unit tests, sprint code reviews, and test plans. Recently, we added another quality layer to our process: acceptance test criteria. This new step occurs at the development story level before any coding begins. The goal is to ensure…
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Design and Development Clinic Review – April 2019
Doug Durham and I recently completed another Software Design and Development Clinic. This week-long set of classes is designed to help level up software developers into senior developers. For us leading the classes, the week is always exhausting but they’re still one of my favorite weeks of the year. Leading even a small group of…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 3: Framework for Structured Critical Thinking
Have you ever wrestled with a problem in your mind and then, while trying to explain it to someone else, had an epiphany of how to solve it? This has happened to me on numerous occasions. Or have you ever jumped in to develop some code for a piece of business logic that you felt…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 2: Story/Task Decomposition and Estimation as Design
In my first post of this series, I discussed how ambiguity and lack of shared understanding between members of a product development team can occur when we rely on unstructured, ad hoc, and abstract communication processes (i.e., conversations and high-level user stories) for expressing our thoughts and ideas. We feel like we are painting a…
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The Danger of Incomplete Pictures, Part 1
I was recently re-introduced to one of my favorite essays, Why We Should Build Software Like We Build Houses, by Leslie Lamport. Leslie is one of several thought leaders within our industry who I really admire, both for his insights into the nature of software design as well as for his contributions in terms of…
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